July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. needs to
do more to atone for misdeeds at his newspapers, lawmakers said
after the company dropped its bid for full control of British
Sky Broadcasting Group Plc.

Labour Party lawmaker Chris Bryant said the New York-based
company should be barred from owning any media in Britain unless
its non-executive directors can prove they took steps to combat
practices that triggered what Prime Minister David Cameron
called a “firestorm.”

Since the July 4 report that the News of the World tabloid
had hacked into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl, public
and political anger has forced News Corp. to close down the
paper and abandon its BSkyB bid.

“Now what it needs to do is sell a couple of newspapers,”
Bryant said in a telephone interview in London today. “News
Corp. has not been able to deal with criminality in its own
organization and they shouldn’t have any media responsibility in
this country.”

Bryant said he will write to News Corp non-executive
directors in the U.S. to ask what they have done to investigate
the allegations of wrongdoing.

“News Corp in the U.S. is the parent company and that is
where it’s fiduciary duty lies,” Bryant said. “I will be
asking non-executive directors precisely what they did to
investigate allegations.” Failure to demonstrate that they took
steps should lead them to “withdraw from media ownership in the
U.K.”

Tom Watson, another Labour lawmaker critical of Murdoch,
told Sky News that “We’ve still not seen anyone at the top of
the company resigning. Until somebody carries the can and
somebody apologizes at the top of this company, I think this is
going to carry on and on. The consequences of this will play out
over weeks and months.”

‘Years’ of Probes

John Whittingdale, the Conservative lawmaker who chairs
Parliament’s Culture Committee, told Sky he expected to “spend
a great deal of time uncovering exactly what has been going on.
It’s going to be several years before we know everything.”

“At last the sun is setting on Rupert Murdoch’s British
empire,” Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader Simon Hughes said. “My
colleagues and I have been warning for 17 years of the dangers
of the growing influence of the Murdochs in Britain.”